About Harry Potter (Part 2)

First off... You may be wondering why this seems to be such a big deal to me.
Actually, it's because Rowling has done just what Youssef has said he wants to do as a writer. Rowling is a christian who wrote a series of books to a secular society. The books were filled with a christian world view that became more and more obvious as the series progressed. She affected our culture towards a mindset that could be more open to accepting God.

Now before any of you freak out about that statement and think I'm being unholy and believe that we should all live in a christian getto and never affect the world around us, I would like to point out that other religions and ideas have been incrementally affecting our culture and most of the time we don't know it! When you next watch a movie or read a book really try to look for those underlying messages that have small references to accepting homosexuality or humanistic ideas. When you realize how much of that is affecting our culture what is wrong with a christian doing the same thing? (And *shock* people even liking the books. Perhaps there is a desire for that world view in our society... maybe people are seeking God in some fashion and don't realize it?)

A really good web site to look at in regards to Harry Potter is http://hogwartsproffesor.com He wrote a book called "Looking for God in Harry Potter" the only christian book that I could find that actually sounded reasonable and well thought out. (The few that I found who were against the books didn't really have any real reason and mostly sounded like every thing they said came from fear and an unreasonable stretching of issues that wheren't really there... in my opinion.)

Someone who commented on that website said the following that I found to be very helpful.

-In Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old and New Testament, look up “witch or witchcraft” and it refers you to “sorcery” which is the Greek word pharmakia, from which we get our English word pharmacy. This word “primarily signified ‘the use of medicine, drugs, spells’; then ‘poisoning’; then ’sorcery.’ In ’sorcery,’ the use of drugs, whether simple or potent, was generally accompanied by incantations and appeals to occult powers, with the provision of various charms, amulets, etc, professedly designed to keep the applicant or patient from the attention and power of demons, but actually to impress the applicant with the mysterious resources and powers of the sorcerer.”
I worked with Wycliffe Bible Translators (publications) and I assure you that the shamanistic power among indigenous peoples is real and Satanic, and is used to control and terrorize. There is a world of difference between such sorcerer/shamans and the mechanical or technological “magic” in Harry Potter. There is no sorcery, occultism nor incantational magic in the Potter books (the first is actually called Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone, but American publishers changed it).


Therefore, if we as christians assume the books are evil because there are words such as witch, magic, wand, and so forth aren't we doing a disservise to the truth? The Bible does not condem a person for holding a stick and (pretending as the books are fiction) that they can say a word and their glasses will come zooming to their hand from wherever they lost the glasses in the house. Is "magic" like that a sin? My point was that if you tell people that "Yes any 'magic' is sinful" and they can see that that kind of magic isn't actually wrong couldn't they possibly not understand what the truly evil magic is? When Eve said that they couldn't eat the fruit on the tree and not to touch it either (going a step farther than God told them), but when she did take the fruit "and saw that it was good to eat" perhaps noticing that touching it didn't do anything bad to her she thought eating it would be all right too, but it wasn't. The sin wasn't in holding it or looking at it in this case it was exactly what God had said, "Don't eat it." I'm not saying that you should look into incantational magic and test the waters, but not actually do it. The Bible says that is a sin. It does not say however that pretending that you can fly or turn a mouse into a teacup is a sin. Problems happen when we add to what God says.


Youssef feels called to write books for a secular audiance, and I would love it if he was able to write something that would become as popular as the Harry Potter books. Then be able to share his faith with so many people who would listen to him! That is why this topic is important to me. I'm sure that at some point he will recieve critisizm from christians about what he writes just like Rowling did (and does), but does that mean that he should write books for a christian getto and never attempt to reach out to our society at large and incremetaly bring some minds into an openness to hearing God?

That is why I liked the Harry Potter books. That's why it bother's me when Christians reject them without knowing what the Bible says about incantational magic. Not understanding that what the Bible condems, Harry Potter does not promote.

(To which my origional post could have been title "Let's stop shooting down people on our side" or something to that effect.) :)